John P. Roberts, M.D., Professor and Chief of Transplant Surgery and the Organ Transplant Service at UCSF, has been elected President of the National Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network/United Network for Organ Sharing (OPTN/UNOS) Board of Directors. Roberts will serve a one-year term beginning in late June 2012.
“Neither man had a donor who was a match. But each had a family member willing to donate a kidney to a stranger, allowing them all to be part of chain which would, in turn, give Baty and Cienfuegos kidneys from other strangers. With 17 participating hospitals in 11 states, the chain consisted of 30 people willing to give up their kidney, matched with 30 more who needed one to survive. UCSF surgeons Andrew Posselt, M.D., Ph.D. and Ryutaro Hirose, M.D., performed the transplants on Baty and Cienfuegos – just two of the 300 or so kidney transplants performed at UCSF every year.”
“Diana L. Farmer, an internationally renowned fetal and neonatal surgeon, has been named chair of the Department of Surgery at UC Davis Health System. Farmer is known for her skilled surgical treatment of congenital anomalies and for her expertise in cancer, airway and intestinal surgeries in newborns. She is principal investigator of several National Institutes of Health clinical trials on the effectiveness and safety of spina bifida treatments before birth, and she is researching a novel stem cell therapy for repairing damaged neural tissue in spina bifida patients….Farmer comes to UC Davis from UC San Francisco, where she was chief of pediatric surgery, vice chair of surgery, surgeon-in-chief of the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and a professor of surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences. ”
The UCSF Bariatric Surgery Center, led by Stanley J. Rogers, M.D., has been accredited by the American College of Surgeons (ACS) as a Level 1 Accredited Bariatric Center (ACS BSCN). The American College of Surgeons Bariatric Surgery Center Network Accreditation Program (ACS BSCN) accredits facilities in the United States that have undergone an independent, voluntary and rigorous peer evaluation in accordance with nationally recognized bariatric surgical standards. This adds to the prestige of the program which previously also earned the Blue Distinction for Bariatric Surgery from Blue Shield of California and was designated a Blue Cross “Center of Expertise Hospital for bariatric surgery.
Edward Kim, M.D. will be among the recipients of 2011 Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educator’s Excellence in Teaching Awards at the Academy’s annual Celebration on Monday, September 19, 2011. The Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators is dedicated to creating an environment that enhances the status of teachers at UCSF, promotes and rewards teaching excellence, fosters curricular innovation and encourages scholarship in medical education.
“The far-reaching implications were made painfully clear” in an eloquent and moving essay in the New England Journal of Medicine by John Maa, M.D., Assistant Professor of Surgery and Director of the UCSF Surgical Hospitalist Program. A national leader in improving emergency care, “Dr. Maa describes the all-too-familiar story of a 69-year-old woman who is admitted to the E.R. for a procedure to correct an irregular heartbeat. Her operation is delayed because she has to board for a full day while waiting for a real bed. During the delay, she suffers a major stroke and dies…………The woman, we learn, was the author’s mother.”
— Excerpt from NY Times article by noted physician-journalist Dr. Pauline Chen
“The Waits that Matter” – Essay in The New England Journal of Medicine”
NY Times: “When Hospital Overcrowding Becomes Personal”
Wall Street Journal Online Network: “Long hospital Wait Times Can be Deadly”
Warren Gasper, M.D., junior fellow in the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery and a member of the research lab of Christopher Owens M.D., was awarded first prize in the poster competition at the annual meeting of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) for the posterPercutaneous Peri-Adventitial Guanethidine Delivery Induces Renal Artery Sympathectomy: Preclinical Experience and Implication for Refractory Hypertension. One hundred researchers competed worldwide for the honor. The President and President-Elect of SVS, and an audience of vascular surgeons, choose the winner after viewing PowerPoint presentations from the ten finalists.
Linda M. Reilly, M.D., Professor of Surgery in the Division of Vascular & Endovascular Surgery at UCSF, has been inducted into the prestigious “Society of Scholars”. Established in 1967 by Johns Hopkins University, the Society recognizes individuals whose careers began at Hopkins, and later rose to prominence in their fields through distinguished achievement. Dr. Reilly has the additional distinction of being the first woman to complete the General Surgery Residency program at Hopkins, one of the most storied in the country. She is now Director of a similarly distinguished program at UCSF. An outstanding and compassionate physician, Dr. Reilly is also Principal Investigator in a number of clinical trials focused on the improvement of devices and refinement of surgical technique in endovascular repair of complex aortic aneurysms. She is widely-respected for her clinical investigations that have led to numerous advances in treatment and improvements in patient outcomes.
Last year, a team led by Dr. Peter Stock of UCSF reported on results from a large multicenter study testing the safety and feasibility of transplanting kidneys where both the donor and recipients were infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The results, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the recipients survived nearly as long as non-HIV infected recipients of kidney transplants. As a result of the Stock-led trial, and a just-published paper from Johns Hopkins projecting that 500 to 600 H.I.V.-infected livers and kidneys would become available each year if the ban were repealed, the paradigm appears to be changing. Federal health agencies, including the CDC, are now urging, as reported by the N.Y. Times in today’s editions, that the absolute ban on transplanting H.I.V.-positive organs be lifted.
A New Push to Let H.I.V. Patients Accept Organs That Are Infected
Kidney transplants Found Safe in HIV patients
New England Journal of Medicine – Outcomes of Kidney Transplantation in HIV-Infected Recipients
Estimating the Potential Pool of HIV-Infected Deceased Organ Donors in the United States
“Andre Campbell, M.D. a UCSF professor of surgery, was recognized on March 29 by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for his outstanding service as a trauma and acute care surgeon at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH).”